IN CONVERSATION
Confessions of a hope-a-holic
AMMU JOSEPH
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Gloria Steinem, arguably the most glamorous and globally recognisable face of the international women's movement, appears as energetic and inventive as ever at 72. On the eve of her third visit to India, an exclusive interview with the woman who has been described as "America's most influential, eloquent and revered feminist".
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Photo: AP
Feminists have a great sense of humour: Gloria Steinem.
GLORIA STEINEM baking apple pie on a comedy show? Well, why not? This is, after all, the woman who, as a young journalist in the 1960s, worked undercover as a waitress at the Playboy Club in New York and wrote an expose headlined, "I was a Playboy Bunny."
What she revealed about the sordid underside of what was then a novel, glitzy and exclusive chain of nightclubs prompted a personal response from its owner, Hugh Hefner, and led to some changes for the better in the working conditions of her temporary colleagues. Nonetheless she thinks the assignment that shot her into fame was a "professional mistake" because of its immediate — though short-lived — repercussions on her career as a serious journalist.
Getting back to the apple pie, Steinem was recently on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central — an American cable and satellite television channel — wearing an apron, slicing fruit, rolling dough, laughing and cracking jokes along with her old friend, Jane Fonda. They were on the show hosted by Stephen Colbert to talk about their new radio venture, Greenstone Media. But, as Steinem puts it, they used the occasion to convey "funny little lessonettes in equality." And also "to show that feminists have a great sense of humour — though I don't see how that could be news any more."
Defying stereotypes
Steinem, who is arguably the most glamorous and globally recognisable face of the international women's movement, has consistently defied the many unfounded but popular stereotypes that still persist about feminists, including the corny concept of the man-hating feminist. Yet, when she decided to get married in 2000, at the age of 66, there was an astonishing outpouring of outrage in the media, with critics recalling her dismissive comments about the institution of marriage — most famously that it was "designed for a person and a half". "What surprised me was that no one saw how much marriage has changed since the 1960s," she says.
"The friend I married," as she puts it, was South African entrepreneur and environmentalist David Bale. She wore jeans to the wedding, a Cherokee ceremony conducted by her Native American friend, Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation. Sadly, however, Bale was diagnosed with brain lymphoma three years later and passed away at the end of 2003.
Steinem's interest in children is another aspect of her personality that flies in the face of uninformed but common notions about feminists. Concern about child abuse led her to co-produce and narrate an Emmy Award winning TV documentary, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories". She helped to found the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering organisation working in the area of non-sexist, multiracial children's education, and was also involved in Choice USA and its efforts to preserve comprehensive sex education in schools. Founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, she was an initiator of its Take Our Daughters to Work Day, a national occasion devoted to girls. In 1995 Parenting magazine presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in promoting girls' self-esteem.
Commenting on this relatively little known part of her work, Steinem says, "It has always seemed to me that the only form of arms control is how we raise our children. If our homes normalise violence, it will be normal in the streets and in foreign policy. I've never understood why every course in political science doesn't start with family and childrearing: if we don't have democratic families, we will never really have democratic societies. If a child is raised to believe that a sister is inferior to a brother, if men are raised to believe they have to be in control and even violent toward their own wives in order to prove their `masculinity,' then we've created a model of domination for races, classes and castes. We've also created the cult of masculinity on which militarism and terrorism are based."
Off-beat subjects
Some of her best-selling books are on subjects that could also be considered off-beat for a feminist author — for example, Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of the late movie star seen by many as just a "dumb blonde" sex symbol. She is currently working on a new book on over 30 years on the road as a feminist organiser. Titled Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, it is part `on-the-road' and part memoir. "On-the-road books have been an especially `masculine' genre because the road was supposed to be too dangerous and disreputable for women," she says. "Even if a woman did get the courage to travel, she might not be accepted when she came home. That's beginning to change, but there is still a big imbalance in on-the-road writing."
At 72, the woman who has been described as "America's most influential, eloquent and revered feminist" is clearly as energetic and inventive as ever. She is a director of Greenstone Media, the first women-owned radio network in the US, officially launched in September 2006 to meet "the unserved need on radio for innovative, topical, relevant and entertaining programming of particular interest to women" and to "build the leading brand for women's talk programming." According to Steinem, Greenstone has been successful with the stations that have switched to their programming — mainly so far in relatively small markets.
The Women's Media Center, based in New York, is another recent venture initiated by Steinem, Fonda and other well-known media women seeking to ensure that "women and women's experiences are reflected in the media, that women are represented as sources for and subjects of the media, and that women media professionals have equal opportunities for employment and advancement."
According to Steinem, "The point is not only to get women jobs in the media, but to make the news more accurate and useful. Instead of stories about whether a starlet is pregnant or not, we need reports on the international crime of sex trafficking. Instead of a national security that's measured in fighter jets and nuclear weapons, we need one that's also measured in access to fresh water, education, jobs, contraception, health care."
Steinem has always been politically active, both as a journalist and as a citizen. In 1971, along with Betty Friedan, she set up the National Women's Political Caucuses. She wrote a political column for New York magazine, which she helped to found. That magazine later helped in the launch of Ms. Magazine, which she co-founded in 1972 and edited for 15 years (she continues to serve Ms. as a consulting editor).
She continues to be actively engaged in US politics and has strong views on the regime of George W. Bush. At a meeting of women journalists in January 2005 she prefaced her talk with an apology "for not getting out the most destructive president we've ever had". She had spent six months of the previous year on a campaign bus in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio (her home state), urging women to vote for the Democratic Party. In an interview last year she was quoted saying that her No. 1 priority is "getting rid of George Bush, by any means necessary, short of violence".
Commenting on the results of the recent US election, when the Democrats regained control of the Congress and Senate after 12 long years, she says, "It feels as if we have pulled back from the brink of destruction, but the damage from six years of Bush & Company turning the country into a rogue state will be hard to reverse. We've got an electoral system in which about half of possible voters don't participate — partly because those who benefit make it harder to vote in the US than in any modern democracy in the world. So the Bush administration was put in power by about 30 per cent of the country. We're going to have to repair that system, reform media that are so inadequate that 60 to 80 per cent of the people who voted for Bush thought they were voting for the opposite of many of his positions, and also try to reverse the damage to other countries, to the international treaties we've broken, and much more... But I'm a hope-a-holic — hope is a form of planning — so I feel much better now than I did before the election."
Interesting take
With Hillary Clinton having joined the presidential race, and competing with Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination, two of Steinem's special concerns — gender and race — could well be placed on a collision course in the battle for ballots. But Steinem has an interesting take on the options: "I think both Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama would make good presidents — a hundred times better than Bush, who had failed in every business before his election as governor and, before his election as president, had only been out of the US when he went to Mexico to party. He had every advantage and failed. Obama has had almost every disadvantage and succeeded; Hillary has survived being a woman and a wife in a patriarchy and also survived being the target of the ultra-rightwing for almost 20 years."
On the question of who would be more acceptable as president to the American public today: a black man or a white woman, she says, "I think the majority of voters are more open-minded than the majority of power brokers, pundits and consultants in Washington... If the presidency follows the pattern of other positions of power — say, on corporate boards — then an African-American man will be accepted before any variety of woman. But that's a big `if'." However, she points out, "What's more important to me is that we maintain our coalition of `out' groups: after all, Obama is a feminist and Clinton is anti-racist. Neither will win if we're divided."
Steinem is due in India soon at the invitation of Women's World India, which is organising a South Asian Women Writers' Colloquium in Delhi later in February. She will also speak at the fifth Annual Meeting of the Network of Women in Media, India, in Bangalore.
This visit marks the golden jubilee of her first trip to the country in the mid-1950s, although she did return in the mid-1970s. She says the two years she spent in India as a young woman turned out to be "crucial and transforming, even though I didn't have the confidence or vision to know it at the time... like a pebble in a pond whose circles of influence are still going out." She credits her enduring commitment to travelling and organising to that period, part of which she spent learning about Mahatma Gandhi and walking through villages with Vinoba Bhave's followers: "They used to quote Gandhi — if you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. When I went home, the civil rights movement proved this was true. Later, so did feminism — which was and is almost entirely based on small groups of women organising locally."
According to Steinem, she tends to live in the future rather than in the past and when people ask what her greatest accomplishment has been, she responds, "But I haven't done it yet!" Given my age, she says, they find that odd or amusing. Her hopes for the years ahead are: "Writing much more, going deeper instead of wider, learning all that I can about original cultures, dancing more, and living to at least 100!"
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